Wednesday, March 09, 2005

The beach trip where you first talked about it.  The night he proposed.  "The Dinner", with all your families celebrating together.  Your bridal shower.

By now, you've accumulated a lot of pictures, probably digital, and keeping them organized can be a real hassle.  You'd love to share your photos with family and friends, or maybe even make a photo album on CD as a favor to your guests.  Fortunately, there are a lot of programs available that will organize your photos, help you easily touch up your photos, and even create photo albums to share.  There's a good chance your wedding photographer will be using a digital camera, too, and could provide you with even more files to fill up your hard drive.

Macintosh computers ship with a suite of software known as iLife.  Not being Mac people, we can't comment too much on the software, only that we've seen it in action, and it's nice.

For the Windows crowd, Google provides a free tool named Picasa, which you can download for free from www.picasa.com.  A comparable commercial application is Photoshop Album, available almost everywhere.  A comparison of the two is at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3460061.  Each program has its good features and "I wish it had" features, but in the end, it's tough to beat the price of Picasa, especially since it will do pretty much everything the average user needs it to.  Both of these programs offer the ability to create photo albums you can burn to a CD as a favor for your guests.

If you want to share traditional prints via a digital means, there are lots of flatbed scanners available that will do a decent job of converting prints to digital files, which can be used with either of these programs just as if they were digital photos.  We typically avoind buying the cheapest thing on the shelf, but any mid-priced model from HP or Canon will do an excelleet job.  You want to look for a scanner that supports 1200 dpi or better, ideally 2400 dpi or better.  Since your monitor displays at (probably) 96 dpi, a scanned photo will look enormous.  Most scanners will come with software to help you resize your photos, and both Picasa and Photoshop album will resize as well.

Thursday, March 10, 2005 2:14:47 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |